Line hits 200M users; adds 100M in 6 months
A new article by TechInAsia reports that Japan-based chat app Line has reached a milestone user base of 200 million. Line had just recently reached 100 million in January of this year, indicating that the chat app has doubled its user base in the last six months alone. Korean competitor KakaoTalk reached its first 100 million users earlier this month. China-based WeChat is closing in on 400 million users, most of whom are based in China. TechInAsia notes that Line is commemorating this milestone by giving out premium stickers until July 26.

Hashtags not doing much for brands on FB
A recent article by Inside Facebook revealed that hashtags have not led to higher engagement for brands on Facebook. The new Twitter-like feature launched in early June on the social network, and hashtag prominence grew steadily throughout the month. Based on a study by Simply Measured, the findings indicate that nearly 20 percent of all Interbrand 100 posts contained hashtags by the end of June–up from 3 percent on June 12. Hashtagged brand posts also saw two peaks during the month, with 26 percent of brand posts incorporating them on both July 20 and July 27. The study also found, however, that these hashtags were still not having much of an effect on engagement levels for brands. Nate Smith, a Marketing analyst for Simply Measured is noted as suggesting hashtags may become more effective if their presence is collaboratively reinforced and given cohesion across multiple platforms.

Simply Measured’s report further indicated that visual content receive the highest levels of engagement by a long shot, as photo and video posts received 98 percent of all engagement on brand posts. Simply Measured notes that brands are well-aware of the allure of imagery, as 80 percent of brand posts from the period featured photos or video. Meanwhile, questions received negligible engagement (thereby justifying the termination of Facebook questions, a product option previously available for brand pages).

Another interesting finding from the study revealed that posts between 50 and 99 characters received the highest levels of engagement. The success of brand posts declined as they got longer, with a sharp drop at posts over 250 characters in length.

In India, Line added 5M new users in 3 weeksLine has been turning up the heat on its competitors, establishing aggressive expansion tactics worldwide. As TechInAsia reports, this strategy has reaped its rewards for the Japan-based chat app, particularly in its recent efforts and focus on the Indian market. A mere three weeks into launching a TV ad campaign in the market, Line reported adding 5 million new users in India. That’s almost 250,000 new users per day, in India alone. TechInAsia notes that, given a majority 70 percent of Line users are overseas users, odds are there were some Indian users prior to the official launch in the market. In any case, Line is clearly starting to tip the scales, by focusing on areas where WeChat’s dominance amongst Asian chat apps remains largely curtailed (virtually everywhere outside of China).

90% of Thai netizens use social mediaSocial media has continued to grow in popularity in Thailand this year. The country is the 16th biggest for Facebook, with 18 million users. Meanwhile, Bangkok remained the biggest city on Facebook, a title earned in 2012, and also continued to be one of the two most-Instagrammed places worldwide. So it comes as no surprise that Thais are even more engaged on social media this year. Based on a survey by Thailand’s Electronic Transactions Development Agency (ETDA), findings reported by TechInAsia illustrated how Thais spent a weekly average of 32 hours on the internet, with over 38 percent spending at least 20 hours on a weekly basis. The survey also found that more than 90 percent of Thai netizens were using social media. Facebook remained the most popular platform, claiming over 92 percent of responses. YouTube came in at 63.7 percent, while Line followed close behind with just over 61 percent. Desktop PCs were still the most popular choice for web access (45 percent), while notebooks claimed just over a quarter of responses. Smartphones followed with 22.7 percent, while Tablets came in with 6.8 percent.

Variety of options still key for social logins
eMarketer recently reported on the state of social logins in Q2 2013. Although Facebook has remained the most popular platform amongst consumers, its slight majority amongst other social login platforms–a 54 percent stake in Q3 2012–has declined as other social login platforms have maintained preference amongst “solid minorities”. The Janrain study indicates that Facebook’s share of 46.2 percent holds against Google’s 34 percent. Yahoo comes in third, but trails far behind with just 6.6 percent of respondents indicating preference. Twitter follows Yahoo with 5.7 percent. Twitter in particular has lost significant ground as a preferred platform for social logins, losing a considerable share since holding 10 percent Q3 2012.

eMarketer notes that the preference for social logins directly corresponds to the kind of site being accessed. Facebook logins were much more preferred for gaming and entertainment sites (64 percent). Facebook came out ahead with a majority on music and retail sites as well (61 percent and 59 percent respectively). Nonetheless, the breakdown shows a widened spread of preference for social logins, indicating that variety has remained crucial for the success of social logins throughout this year.

K-Pop YouTube views tripled thanks to ‘Gangnam Style’According to a recent article by Mashable, K-Pop videos have become highly popular in the past year due to the staggering success of Psy’s video for “Gangnam Style”. YouTube announced that views of videos from Korean artists have tripled since last July, when Psy’s record-breaking video emerged on the video sharing platform. YouTube compiled data supporting this fact, as indicated by the sharp spike in K-pop video views indicated in the graph below. These views increase again, when Psy launched “Gentleman” a follow-up video earlier this year. “Gangnam Style” is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time, with over 1.7 billion views. “Gentleman” has seen incredible success as well, having accrued 483 million views in just over 3 months since its launch. YouTube notes that the year prior to ‘Gangnam Style’, K-pop videos had a viewership of 2.2 billion worldwide; in the year after the video’s launch, this number surged to 7 billion. The platform also notes that a majority of views prior to ‘Gangnam Style’ came from Asia Pacific. In the past year, however, 91% of the views came from outside of the region. Mashable notes that US views in particular had doubled in the year after “Gangnam Style” was released.

30M users, 300M subscriptions on KakaoTalk Games
Korean chat app KakaoTalk has seen considerable success on its gaming offshoot, KakaoTalk Games. The platform has grown to 30 million users and 300 million accumulated subscriptions in its first year since it launched. TechInAsia notes that this feat is particularly impressive given that it only offered ten games when it was introduced last year. The company reported that this increase in users is accompanied by a whopping increase of 194% in accumulated sales on the gaming platform.

6% of US netizens are on Reddit; mostly young malesTheNextWeb recently reported on the demographic breakdown of Reddit users in the US. Based on a study by the Pew Research Center, the findings indicated that 6 percent of the total internet population were active users on the social link sharing platform. TheNextWeb notes that the failure of its main competitor, Digg, is a factor that led to the rapid growth of Reddit. While the 6 percent is an overall internet user rate, it is interesting to note that 15 percent of male internet users in the 18-29 age bracket frequented the site. By contrast, female users in the same age bracket only came to 5 percent, and men aged 30-49 were at 8 percent.

300M Enterprise Accounts on Sina Weibo
As Sina Weibo users continue to increase, brands are quickly taking to establishing their own presence on the microblogging platform. According to China Internet Watch, Sina Weibo had roughly 300 million Enterprise accounts in 2012. The platform itself has users accessing Weibo from multiple sources; desktop users hit 285 million, while mobile app users were at 88 million in March 2013. According to Sina, the top five brand categories for Enterprise accounts were online shopping, entertainment, consumer electronics, catering food and clothing. It is interesting to note that online shopping comes out on top with a significant margin of 6.4% in terms of most followed Enterprise Weibo Accounts. Receiving promotional information constituted the strongest reason for following Enterprise accounts, with nearly a quarter of the respondents agreeing that this was a factor (23.9%).

China Now Has 591M netizens, 460M on mobile webAccording to a recent article by TechInAsia, internet users in China has grown to consist of 591 million users and 460 million mobile web users Based on new data from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the findings illustrate considerable growth in the past three years, from the 420 million internet users reported in mid-2010. The number of mobile web users in particular has doubled since December 2009. TechInAsia notes that the increasing popularity of mobile web is related to the high penetration rate of mobile phones, with more than 1.1 billion subscriptions “at last count” and 300 million users with 3G. Mobile web is especially promising, given the fact that over 70 percent of new netizens accessed the internet via mobile phones in the first half of 2013.–roughly twice as much as new users who access the web through desktop PCs (35.4%).

Influencers on Sina Weibo are less active this year: survey
According to TechInAsia, Sina Weibo activity is on the decline compared to its booming performance and growth last year. The findings are based on data from a third-party tool called WeiboReach, that tracked verified and influential users with over 10,000 followers. The findings indicated that Sina Weibo activity started to decline in October of last year.

As the graph above indicates (click to enlarge), Weibo was at the height of its performance during Summer 2012, just as it revealed a massive user base of 500 million users (and 46.3 million daily active users). Aside from expected seasonal spikes (January’s spike is tied to Chinese New Year; the second spike is due to the Ya’an earthquake in late April).

Pinterest has 70M users; over 70% in US
According to a recent Semiocast study, Pinterest has reached 70 million registered users worldwide. The report also indicates that more than 20 million images were pinned, repinned or liked during the month of June alone. The findings also suggest that 71% of the total users are based in the US, as are 79% of of active users on the platform. The concentration in the US market will be mitigated, however, by the fact that international adoption is growing; nearly half of the new accounts from June were for non-US users, while 55% of the new users were based in the US. Semiocast predicts that the international user base may overtake that of the US within the next 18 months. The study also found that English-speaking and North American markets constitute the majority of the worldwide user base; Canada, the UK, Australia and Mexico follow as the largest markets, after the 49 million users in the US.

In another interesting finding, Semiocast found that China had the largest base of business accounts worldwide. While there are only 320,000 Pinterest users in China, over 190,000 of them were registered as business accounts, constituting 35 percent of all business accounts on the platform.

Vietnam users spent 4.8B mins on Facebook in April 2013
According to a recent eMarketer report, a large majority of internet users in Vietnam are youths and young adults. Based on April 2013 data from the US Census Bureau, the estimate has about 52.6% of the internet population under 30 years of age. Data from ComScore also suggested that the 15-24 and 25-34 age brackets make up nearly three-quarters of internet users in Vietnam (72.8%).

Of these internet users, social networking is gaining in popularity. Facebook ranked 5th amongst top 15 web properties for April 2013, with 11.8 million total unique visitors. Meanwhile, Google and Yahoo came in first and second, with 15.5 million and 13.1 million unique visitors respectively. On the other hand, Facebook dominated all 15 web properties when it came to total minutes spent. As the chart below indicates, almost 4.8 billion minutes were spent on Facebook during the month, while Google claimed just over 3.5 billion minutes. Facebook also claimed the highest number of unique visitors amongst social networking sites by a huge margin; its 11.8 million unique visitors are more than double the 5.3 million visits to ZING Me and blogger.

A snapshot of Pakistan’s digital landscape in 2013
TechInAsia recently reported on a summary of the digital landscape in Pakistan this year. The findings indicate that social media is on the rise in the market. For instance, there are now over nine million Facebook users in Pakistan, and the last million was gained in the last 175 days. That’s pretty impressive given the fact that internet penetration stands at a relatively low 15%, or 29.1 million of the total population. This means that Facebook has a penetration of roughly one-third of all netizens in Pakistan. Blogging follows Facebook as the second most popular social media activity in the market. Despite the platform’s ban in 2012, YouTube has remained popular and ranks third amongst social media platforms. LinkedIn has 1.5 million users in Pakistan, making it the 10th largest LinkedIn nation worldwide. Meanwhile, Twitter is estimated to have 1.8 million users in the country, and is noted for being a major source for breaking news.

50% of UK population will use social networks in 2013
A recent article by eMarketer indicated that social networking would reach half of the population of the UK this year. The study further predicts that the growth will continue for the next few years: the penetration rate will reach 55.6 percent of the total population by 2017, or 71 percent of all internet users in the UK. It is predicted that the only age bracket without 50 percent penetration or more will be seniors aged 65 years or over. eMarketer note that the UK is a leader amongst markets for social media, with many areas of opportunity for platforms to expand. Precedent indicates that the social media audience has consisted of younger demographics (12-44 years of age); however, users over 65 years old will drive the largest increases this year, predicted to grow by over 15 percent in 2013, and nearly 11 percent the following year.

KakaoTalk now has 100 million users
According to an article this week by TechInAsia, Korean chat app KakaoTalk has reached its most recent milestone: 100 million users. The chat app has continued to gain momentum since it first launched in 2010. As the graph below illustrates, their growth rate has become jaw-droppingly steep in recent months. KakaoTalk’s expansion goals for Southeast Asia have led to aggressive marketing tactics, such as TV commercials and celebrity endorsements in Indonesia. These strategies have clearly paid off, and are partly the impetus for the chat app’s recent success.

There are now 3 million company pages on LinkedInLinkedIn recently announced that they had recently hit a milestone on their platform: there are now over 3 million company pages on the network. The professional networking platform itself currently has over 225 million users. The company produced an infographic to celebrate this accomplishment on their blog post as well, with interesting factoids (such as the fact that there are over 1000 pages devoted to nanotechnology, and 490 pages with the word ‘ninja’, ‘pirate’ or ‘samurai in the company name). The infographic also suggests that a striking 500,000 of the 3 million company pages were added to LinkedIn in the last 12 months.

Vine shares drop as Instagram Video use risesMashable recently reported that Vine shares have dropped drastically as a result of Instagram’s new launch of a video feature. Based on a study by SimplyMeasured, the findings suggested that tweets containing Vine videos dropped by 40 percent on the day Instagram Video was introduced. Vine’s decline continued throughout Instagram Video’s first week; while 3 million Vines were tweeted on June 15, only 900,000 were shared on June 26. By contrast, Instagram video produced over 5 million videos on its first day (June 20). On the same day, TechCrunch noted that Instagram itself had accumulated 16 billion photos on the platform, with 130 million total users liking 1 billion photos on a daily basis.

WeChat has 70 million users overseas
A few weeks ago, we blogged about WeChat’s expansion outside of China. Unlike its Asian chat app counterparts, KakaoTalk and Line, WeChat’s user base had seen a large majority of its user base rooted firmly in China. The chat app saw some success in its drive to gain overseas users as they hit 40 million non China-based users during May. A more recent report by TechInAsia reveals that this number has climbed to a whopping 70 million users in six short weeks.

Zalo at 3M users, process 30M messages per dayIn other chat app news, TechInAsia reports that Vietnam-based Zalo has reached 3 million users. Unlike WeChat, KakaoTalk and Line’s collective dominance over other markets across Asia, Vietnam remains “relatively untapped” in the region. Zalo, however, is succeeding in gaining users and currently processes over 30 million messages on a daily basis. As noted in a previous blog post, Zalo just hit 2 million in May, indicating that the app is gaining one million users every two months.

There are 9M Facebook users in PakistanTechInAsia recently reported that the number of Facebook users in Pakistan has grown to 9 million earlier this month. The site noted that this milestone is particularly impressive given the fact that it came soon after the country’s user base hit 8 million earlier this year. The numbers are based on a report by Third World Strategy, whose infographic on the growth of the social platform has further insights on the market. Of the 9 million Facebook users, roughly 6.4 million are men, while 2.7 million are women. 70 percent of these users are under 25 years of age, and 44,000 new users join Facebook each week.

Over 92% of Chinese weibo users earn less than $813 per monthTechWeb recently reported on the demographics of Chinese microbloggers, and found that the majority of them are young people at a lower stage in education with lower salaries than the average netizen. Based on a study called the Blue Book of New Media 2013 by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the report indicated that in 2012, about 29.2 percent of weibo users were between 20 to 29 years old. Around 26.5 percent of the weibo users were teenagers between 10-19 years old. Students also constituted the biggest user group on weibo, with nearly 93.9 million users. Partly due to the large number of student weibo users, 7.8% of Chinese weibo users earn a monthly salary of over $813.

Ad spend up 95% on Twitter, 43% on YouTube
According to a recent MediaPost article, Twitter and YouTube have seen significant increases in ad spend on their respective platforms. The increases were based on figures from four holding companies (Aegis, Havas, Interpublic and Publicis) that represent a majority 60 percent share of the total agency spend. Twitter came out on top, with ad spend increasing by 95 percent. Meanwhile, YouTube saw increases of 43 percent since May of 2012 By contrast, Yahoo and Facebook saw slight decreases; while Facebook was only down by 1 percent, Yahoo was down by 4 percent on total ad spend. MediaPost noted that the digital category saw increases in ad spend overall this past month. Mobile ad spending was up by 122 percent in May, while online video saw increases of 92 percent. Social media collectively saw ad spend increases of 54 percent last month.

UK moms use Facebook, YouTube more than general population
An article from eMarketer this week indicated that young mom internet users are highly active on social media in the UK. Based on a March 2013 study by BabyCentre, the findings suggested that 79 percent of 18- to 34-year old mothers who used the internet were active Facebook users. This same percentage applies to YouTube users as well. This means that mom internet users overindexed by 7 percent on Facebook and 12 percent on YouTube compared to the general adult population of the UK. Twitter came in third with a considerably smaller share of 27 percent, while tumblr claimed 20 percent and Instagram had 17 percent. Interestingly, Pinterest ranked lowest in the study, with only 9 percent of the respondents admitting to using the platform.

“Flirting app” Momo has 40M users; monetise with VIP feature
According to a recent report by TechInAsia, China-based “flirting app” Momo has an impressive user base of 40 million. While the popular app had previously stood on a simple and minimal interface, TechInAsia reports that the app has revamped its image with familiar, chat-like features (like stickers and virtual currency). These changes geared toward monetisation are also coupled with a new VIP option, whereby users are charged $2 per month (or $17 per year) for additional features.